THE GREAT ESCAPE
If you think it’s hard telling drinkers you’ve given up booze, try telling Londoners you’re leaving London
Here’s something I hadn’t anticipated. Telling people that you’re leaving London is a lot like announcing that you’ve given up booze.
I’ve attempted to go teetotal for brief stints before. And unless it’s Dry January, the response is always the same. First: the assumption that you are hiding an underlying health condition. Are you pregnant? You must be. I hear you saying you’re not, but until you sink five flaming sambucas, I’m telling everyone on WhatsApp groups and at the school gates that you are.
A similar thing seemed to apply when we began sharing our decision to leave London. Lots of people were supportive and excited, a fair number having been weighing up the same question during lockdown. But a significant number reacted differently. All these people wanted to hear the same thing. That we weren’t leaving by choice.
Acceptable reasons for moving out of the capital include: being priced out; having a respiratory condition that means the capital’s pollution problem will actually leave you dead (or at least, seriously maimed); or, at a push and very occasionally, a school issue (but it had better be a very serious one, one that says more about your child than the school, and not one that implicates their own child in any way).
Under these circumstances, this group of Londoners/drinkers can feel sorry for you, shake their head, and then get on with living in London/ finishing their pint. If, however, you will insist
that none of these applies, your interlocutor will move on to the second, stickier phase of the interrogation.
In the case of alcohol: your decision to give the booze a rest is not about you, but instead constitutes a thinly veiled criticism of their lifestyle. You will not be able to sit peaceably sipping on a Diet Coke while they down a pint. From here on, unless you capitulate with a half of cider, you will be sitting in judgment on their choices and are therefore to be treated very carefully indeed.
Leaving London? You’re probably already counting the chickens that you’re planning to acquire as soon as you’re in situ and living
The Good Life: pitying them for the poison their children inhale and comparing it with the pure, sweet oxygen yours soon will; shaking your head over muggings their teens will witness on the school run while yours skip along country lanes; tutting over the sexualisation of streetwise preteens while stocking up on smocks and dungarees. You’ve crossed over to the other side. You are no longer on the same team.
In reality, I’m counting worries. Yes, we’ve weighed up all those factors. But I’ve also thought of the museums and galleries our children will no longer have casual access to, and the community we’re tearing them away from. Who knows if these kids, happy here in London, will be equally so when transplanted. Who knows if I will be, without the network of friends I’ve built and leant on daily. So we break the news of our
departure painfully and carefully, at the same time as emphasising the factors pushing us (small house, Tom’s need for a decent workshop, proximity to grandparents who might, some day, need support…) even if the truth is a little more nuanced, boiling down to a series of small nudges and tugs.
Because, of course, there’s a type far, far worse than the Defensive Londoner.
We’ve all met them. The ones who return for a weekend in the Big Smoke, extolling the virtues of their new life, protesting their newfound bliss just a little too much. Telling everyone who’ll listen how they have never looked back, and don’t miss a thing, while bombarding strangers at the bar with house particulars in their new neighbourhood.
Lord preserve me from becoming a Reformed Londoner.
All these people want to hear is that we’re not leaving by choice